Concert: From Babbitt, 'Joy of More Sextets'

By WILL CRUTCHFIELD

Published: January 13, 1988

THE title of ''The Joy of More Sextets'' - a recent violin and piano work by Milton Babbitt that had its first local performance Sunday afternoon at Merkin Concert Hall - refers to a work of 20 years ago entitled simply ''Sextets.'' Neither involves a sextet in the conventional sense of six instruments; the term refers to numerical groupings that govern the pitches and other events in the 20-minute work.

What one hears in ''More Sextets,'' as in most Babbitt, is a dazzling interplay of sound with silence and high registers with low. There is always a fascination in hearing something manifestly difficult done with precision and delicacy at a high speed; only a virtuoso can play Babbitt convincingly. The pianist Alan Feinberg is one of the best. But the interest wears thin about as quickly as with, say, Thalberg or Czerny, and then one wants to hear a deeper level of structure or meaning. With Thalberg or Czerny there are at least likely to be tunes. Mr. Babbitt, composing structures that anyone with pencil, paper and training can puzzle out but that only the wise can hear, too often leaves the listener with little beyond a span of abstract dynamism and deftness.

That is not nothing - indeed, it can be delightful - but it is not enough. The actual pitches and even the sequence of events hardly seem to matter. One has the feeling that the way the piece sounds has been governed by the process, instead of the process being driven by a vision of the way the piece should sound. Mr. Feinberg played the piano part brilliantly. Rolf Schulte, the violinist, was also in formidable command; he adopts a fierce tone that stands in the same relation to older ideas of violinistic beauty as Mr. Babbitt's dissonances to old harmony.

The same players began the program with a dramatically projected ''Fantasy'' from Robert Helps's ''Serenade,'' and followed it with a tiny piece entitled ''Piece,'' played as a memorial to its composer, Morton Feldman: isolated little dots, peeps and murmurs tentatively offered as punctuations of silence.

They were joined by William Purvis for the first performance of George Edwards's new trio for violin, horn and piano, a dissonant-lyrical work in which some pleasant episodes with pulsing, offbeat seconds in the piano part stood out among relatively anonymous-sounding surroundings. The last page is a long dominant-tonic cadence, D to G, but most of the work sounds nontonal to the naked ear.

On his own, Mr. Purvis introduced a soliloquy by Karlheinz Stockhausen, ''In Freundschaft,'' whose most memorable feature was an overlong elaboration of the interval of a minor second, repeated and gradually embellished by burbles and brays as the player turned from side to side. But Mr. Purvis demonstrated beautiful command of soft high passages, as he did again when the trio reassembled for the postlude from Mr. Helps's ''Serenade'' to close the concert.